Hydroclimatologist Trent Ford, a native of Roanoke, Illinois, became State Climatologist in 2019. He previously was an assistant professor in the Department of Geography and Environmental Resources at Southern Illinois University Carbondale, where he taught courses on weather, climate, and society and hazardous weather and researched heat wave predictability and ways to use soil moisture data to improve drought monitoring. He earned a bachelor’s in geography from Illinois State University before completing his master’s and PhD at Texas A&M University.
State Climatologist website
Contact: statecli@isws.illinois.edu or 217-333-0729
